FiOS on schedule, contrary to de Blasio claim

Public Advocate Bill de Blasio got his wires crossed in alleging Friday that Verizon was behind schedule in installing FiOS citywide, the company and the Bloomberg administration said.

The Democrat and mayoral candidate issued a press release accusing the telecommunications giant of not living up to the terms of its franchise agreement with the city, which requires Verizon to have its fiber-optic cables outside more than three-quarters of city dwellings by the end of 2012. The basis of Mr. de Blasio's argument was data from the state Office of Information Technology Services, which show that only 51% of dwellings have access to fiber broadband, which can provide television, telephone and Internet service.

But the public advocate is comparing apples to oranges, according to Verizon and to the city Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, which monitors Verizon's compliance with the franchise agreement.

The franchise agreement governs Verizon's wiring to the exterior of buildings, not inside them. Verizon needs permission from building owners to gets its fiber-optic cable inside, so residents can begin receiving service. Sometimes that can be difficult to obtain, and in any event, it is out of the city's hands, which is why the franchise agreement does not hold Verizon to a schedule on that, sources said.

"His numbers refer to the video deployment Verizon has committed to rather than the fiber Internet deployment we have completed in the city, and if Mr. deBlasio checked his facts he would know that we are ahead of schedule, not behind," said a Verizon spokesman in an e-mailed statement. "Where the franchise agreement calls for 79% of households passed by the end of 2012, we were better than that."

Mr. de Blasio went a step further, charging that Verizon was further behind schedule in wiring minority neighborhoods than affluent ones, which is explicitly prohibited in the franchise agreement. The data compiled by the state show only 40% of Brooklyn households and 46% of Bronx households have access to fiber broadband, compared with 50% in Manhattan, 58% in Queens and 95% in Staten Island.

Mr. de Blasio said in his press release, "Five years into one of the biggest franchise agreements issued by the city, roughly half of homes still have no access to fiber network connections—most of them concentrated in low-income areas like Upper Manhattan, the South Bronx, Western Queens and Central Brooklyn."

A possible reason is that getting permission to wire the apartment buildings that predominate in Brooklyn and the Bronx is more difficult for Verizon than getting into the single-family homes that predominate in Staten Island and to a lesser extent in Queens. There is also more overground wiring in the latter two boroughs, making the task much easier, officials said.

But a spokesman for the public advocate did not buy that explanation. He said data reported by the company to the state shows whether each census tract has at least one household with access to fiber broadband as of December 2012. If Verizon had wired a decent percentage of blocks in, for example, Bedford-Stuyvesant, it is inconceivable that no census tracts in that African-American neighborhood had even one Verizon FiOS-wired building, as the state's data show, the spokesman said.

"In block after block in low-income areas, not a solitary building has been connected to the network," the de Blasio spokesman said. "Is Verizon suggesting that these landlords are engaged in some kind of mass lockout?"

The Verizon spokesman said the public advocate did not contact the company for an explanation prior to issuing his press release.

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